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Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of small dents along his arm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It requires so long to get decent injection scars,” he says. “You inject for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially tough, but you can hardly notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken every drug going from the age of 14. The musician responsible for such acclaimed tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if we should move the conversation to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into random digressions. It's understandable he has given up using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to absorb everything at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he married recently, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my life, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Sober to him means not doing heroin, which he has abstained from in almost a few years. He concluded it was time to give up after a disastrous gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I think some people were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to heroin, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he says. But now he is preparing to release his new album, his first album of original band material in almost 20 years, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the indie big league. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

The artist is also releasing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the name is a reference to the stories that intermittently spread in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, heady, fitfully shocking account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to secure a good company. And it positions me in public as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish from childhood. At school I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period prior to existence got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He attended Boston’s elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “was the best. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once band members left, the group effectively turned into a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the group contracted to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the noise in favour of a increasingly melodic and accessible country-rock style. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album came out in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly labeled by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they released the album their breakthrough record, an impeccable demonstration for Dando’s writing and his melancholic vocal style. The title was taken from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was consuming heroin and had developed a liking for crack, too. With money, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a music clip with actresses and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him among the 50 sexiest individuals alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the notion that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having too much enjoyment.

However, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the significant festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an impromptu live performance to a unfriendly crowd who booed and threw bottles. But this was small beer compared to what happened in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances